Business card statistics, with the sources checked.

The Adobe source is a post on Adobe’s blog dated 26 October 2016. It opens “This post was written by Silkcards”, with the name linked to a printing company’s website, and it gives no source for any of its four figures. CreditDonkey’s statistics page (updated 20 July 2022), the other page people cite, lists that post as its only source.

The same four figures, in the same order, were in a table on Statistic Brain, a statistics website, four years earlier. Its page as captured on 26 July 2012 lists “Percent of business cards handed out that will be thrown out in less than a week: 88%” and names three sources: CNN, BusinesscardABC and Freelance Folder. We read all three in the Wayback Machine. The 2009 CNN article gives no percentage. The 2011 Freelance Folder post, written for the printer MOO, says only “we all throw most of them away”. The nearest match for BusinesscardABC, businesscardsabc.com in 2010, says “more than 90%” are binned “the day they’re received”: a different number, with no source of its own.

Where the trail ends. At the 2012 Statistic Brain table. We found no study, survey, sample size or method behind the 88%, and none showing the opposite either, so the honest answer is that nobody knows. The full chain, hop by hop, is in our trace of the 88% figure.

CreditDonkey says “27 million business cards are printed daily” and names Adobe as its only source, but the Adobe post has no printing figure in it at all. The number first appears, as far as we can find, in the same 2012 Statistic Brain table: “Number of business cards printed daily: 27,397,260”, beside “Number of cards printed in the US annually: 10 billion”. The daily figure is 10 billion divided by 365, to the card. It was worked out, not counted, and none of the three pages the table names mentions how many cards are printed.

Then it travelled. An Aura Print blog post (read in its January 2021 capture, eight months before the BBC linked to it) took “around 27 million” a day and multiplied it “by just the working days in a year” to reach 7,047,000,000. In September 2021 the BBC wrote that cards were being printed “around the world. One estimate put it at 27 million per day, or more than seven billion each year”, linking to that post. Wikipedia’s business card article now says “approximately 7 billion business cards were printed around the world every year”, in a passage that cites the BBC.

Where the trail ends. At the same 2012 table. A yearly US figure of 10 billion, with no source, became a yearly worldwide figure of about 7 billion by way of a working-days sum on a printer’s blog. We found nothing to suggest anyone has counted.

The pages that credit CEIR do not link to a CEIR study. NeverDrop, a lead capture app, wrote on 29 January 2026 that “only 20% of trade show leads ever receive a follow-up according to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research”, and lists CEIR under “Key Sources” with no link to a report. Salesforce Training, a sales training firm, in a post dated 15 February 2012, says “statistics indicate that 80 percent of trade show exhibitors don’t follow up on their show leads”, names no source at all, and counts exhibitors rather than leads. It then describes a test of its own at one unnamed show, with no sample size, which is an anecdote rather than a study.

CEIR’s own 2019 report on this exact subject, How Exhibitors Can Improve Lead Quality and Sales Conversion (we read a copy hosted by the Pittcon exhibition), cites CEIR research three times, and none of it is a follow-up rate. An exhibit company, American Image Displays, wrote in January 2018 that “CEIR and other industry research groups have consistently disavowed that ‘fact,’ claiming that no study of theirs ever supported that conclusion.”

Where the trail ends. Short of CEIR itself. We could not find that disavowal on CEIR’s own site, which now sits inside IAEE, and its older news pages no longer load. So we cannot say CEIR has disowned the figure. We can say we found no CEIR study containing it, and one industry source that says CEIR denies it.

It comes from Aura Print’s blog (published 25 August 2023, updated 3 December 2025), and the page is plain that it is an estimate: “We estimate an eyewatering 12,000 tonnes of business cards are thrown away each year.” It shows no working. The same page puts a year of printed cards at 13,611 tonnes of paper, and 88% of 13,611 is 11,978, so the estimate looks like the untraceable 88% applied to that total. Further down, the same page says “1,200 tonnes of business cards estimated to be thrown away annually”, a tenth of the first figure.

It is easy to take for a UK figure, since it comes from the UK edition of the blog, and our own first notes did. It is not one. The page never says UK, the card counts it gives are the 27 million a day and the billions a year worked out from it, and the US edition carries the same sentence. Repeated elsewhere it loses the word “estimate”: PrintToBrand, in March 2026, says “Each year, around 12,000 tonnes of business cards are discarded”. On Wikipedia’s digital business card article it has become something else again: “The production of these cards requires 12,000 tonnes of paper annually.”

Where the trail ends. At one company’s estimate, with no method shown, which appears to rest on two figures that have no source. We found no measurement of business card waste, in the UK or anywhere else.